Thanks to tunafan for the scan!
from intro by Chip Kidd:
For those of you who thought the comic strip was dead by the end
of the twentieth century, here are 292 pieces of proof that you were
wrong. Mark Beyer was breathing delirious, heartbreaking, otherworldly
life into it by means of Amy and Jordan. Obviously, you weren’t reading
New York Press.
But I sure was. Voraciously. Back in 1989, when I
discovered that Beyer’s strips were appearing regularly in this new
“alternative weekly” paper, I quickly became hooked, and a thought
seized me: I had to clip and save them–they were exquisite poems of
urban despair, dreamy and nightmarish. I was already a fan of Beyer’s
talent based on his book Agony (Pantheon, 1988), but these new strips
revealed, week by week, a whole new dimension to his work–an ingenious
reinvention of panel-design that redefined what a comic strip could be.
As with Peanuts, it helps to try and picture these in the context which
they first appeared in order to appreciate just how profoundly they
emerged from anything else on the newspaper page. Even the “outré” NYP
ads and listings which often ran alongside them were hopelessly dull by
comparison. One of its most impressive aspects was the way Form served
the Content–no matter how eccentric the layout got, it somehow never
confused the narrative. And what narrative: it was as if Candide had
been transported to the East Village and split in two like an amoeba and
holed up in a squat on Avenue C. Along with giant bugs from outer
space.
So I did clip and save them, and put them into an
envelope, which was then placed in a shoebox with a lot of other
envelopes (receipts, receipts!), which was shoved to the back of the
closet of my sixth-floor walk-up studio apartment, which I moved out of
three years later and in the process I unwittingly threw them all away.
Which frankly is just the sort of thing that Amy and Jordan would do.
Drat. “Oh well,” I thought, once I’d realized it, “at some point someone
will collect and publish them, and I’ll get them back that way.” And
that was that.
Fast forward more than ten years, to the spring
of 2002. During a panel of cartoonists I was chairing in Philadelphia, a
member of the audience asked what Mark was working on and where he was.
No one seemed to know. The discussion was transcribed and published in
The Comics Journal that summer, and in the fall Mark contacted me with
the best possible news: He’d read the panel transcript and wanted to
publish again. And the Amy and Jordan strips had never been
comprehensively collected. So now, as an editor, I was able to grant my
own wish.
Amy and Jordan ran from 1988 through early 1996. After
that, Beyer put cartooning aside to pursue other projects. This book
signals his return to the realm of comics, which he says he wants to
start making again. We can only hope he does. For now, I’m just thankful
I finally have my Amy and Jordan collection back.
Live Music
Archive
Librivox
Free Audio
Metropolitan Museum
Cleveland
Museum of Art
Internet
Arcade
Console Living Room
Open Library
American
Libraries
TV News
Understanding
9/11
Comic Books and Graphic Novels
Folkscanomy: A Library of Books
